1/21/2010 @ 7:30PM

Talking To The Kids About Haiti

Haiti is horrifying for any parent, for any person. I can’t stop thinking of one photo, of a woman half-buried in rubble holding her hand out to the photographer for help; of all those buildings leveled like closed accordions.

Between the Web and Twitter and text, I’ve donated money; tracked the progress of the USNS Comfort hospital ship across the Atlantic; read on-the-ground pleas from doctors with not enough IVs. At one point a journalist friend sent news of a particular clinic 70 miles north of Port-au-Prince with seven doctors and not enough patients. Along with others, I echoed its coordinates into Twitter and felt briefly useful.

All the while, my 7-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son have been leaping across my lap, construction-paper light sabers drawn, calling each other “Master Windu” and “Master Yoda” as they hurry off to councils in their bedrooms to plan how to save the galaxy from the evil Sith lords.

Now: how to connect my kids’ good will with the real world? And how much can I tell and show them without inducing nightmares?

Personally I remember nothing about world events from my early childhood. Instead my sense of reality came from murder, suicide and other violence in my urban neighborhoods and school, which is another story

Now I live in the suburbs and my own children live the relatively sheltered lives I want them to have. But I don’t want them to stay that way. Like a lot of other well-meaning parents, I want them to use their advantage to grow up to be world citizens who can think about others and read a map. The question is how to get from here to there.

One friend who grew up in what she calls the Leave it to Beaver suburbs says she and her siblings learned a lot about the larger world from their dad, a juvenile delinquency judge who sometimes had to place children in homes to get them away from abusive parents. As a young child she overheard about cigarette-burned babies and other abuse. As she got older she joined in dinner-table discussions about her father’s work.

While the details of child abuse were sickening, my friend says the knowledge didn’t traumatize her. Instead, she says, that’s how she and her siblings learned that there is evil in the world and that their dad was doing his best to fight it. In fact the whole family pitched in by helping out around the various youth homes where some of the children were placed.

I haven’t yet done volunteer work with my kids. For now I try to teach them about the world by occasionally reviewing the Washington Post‘s Day in Photos. We click through with a globe at our side. I try to succinctly explain what’s going on, whether it’s a crumbling ice shelf or a trucker strike in Bolivia.

When we get to the war photos I give them a basic explanation of the issues, but click past the gore. The worst I let them see are images of families mourning their dead. “These people are sad because someone died,” I say, and we leave it at that.

As for Haiti, my kids know there’s been an earthquake and that it’s terrible. The pictures are so devastating that I’ve only shown them a few, without blood or bodies. Then I made the mistake of mentioning Haiti’s restaveks–kids who even before the quake went to work as indentured servants for strangers in Port-au-Prince because their own families can’t feed them. Worried, my son asked, “But you would never do that to us, right?” I reassured him we don’t do that here.

Since then, I’ve tried to concentrate on less horrific aspects of Haiti and its crisis, like Cuba’s decision to allow aid planes to use its airspace. That brought us all to the map where we looked at the air routes.

We haven’t talked about how many adults and kids have died, but we have talked in very generic ways about how the Haitian kids who survived need doctors, food and homes. After a brief council, my two Jedi decided to empty the “Donate” chambers of their piggy banks (the three other holes are “Save,” “Spend” and “Invest”) to help.

They worried that their money wouldn’t go far. But I told them that, according to CARE, $10 will buy enough water purification tablets to supply clean water for 1,000 people for one day.

So that’s how my kids are connecting, for now.

ForbesWoman Asks: How do you talk to your children about traumatic world and local events?

As endless news reports and images of Haiti overrun TV screens and portals like AOL and
Yahoo!
, how do you explain it all to your kids?